Hinch: Churches trying to take back Christmas

Dec. 24, 2012

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Children rehearse songs at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach the Sunday before Christmas. The Rev. Curtis Webster is working hard to maintain the spiritual meaning of Christmas. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The Rev. Curtis Webster ends his Sunday service with a performance by the choir at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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St. Mark Presbyterian Church choir members Brandon Gaut, at left, and Matt Larsen, lead a lively performance at the end of Sunday services, two days before Christmas. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Children rehearse songs at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach the Sunday before Christmas. The Rev. Curtis Webster is working hard to maintain the spiritual meaning of Christmas. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Children rehearse songs at St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach the Sunday before Christmas. The Rev. Curtis Webster is working hard to maintain the spiritual meaning of Christmas. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Scott Green knows what Christmas should be like.

"An island of peace and calm," says the Newport Beach investor. For Green, a Christian, that means plenty of time to pray, contemplate Jesus' birth and worship God with fellow Christians

But Christmas was not like that this year for Green. He and his wife spent the frenzied weeks leading up to the holiday buying gifts for two dozen family members and friends, attending two to three holiday parties per week (kids in tow), paying hundreds of dollars to a few college students to string up outdoor lights, and somehow finding time to work a demanding job and parent a daughter and two sons, ages seven to 13.

Oh, and the Greens also went to church on Sundays.

As for that quiet prayer time, Green said whenever he managed to wake up early enough he retreated to his back porch in the pre-dawn dark to sit for a few minutes with eyes closed under the heat lamp.

"This time of year you have challenges with your time," he lamented. "You have to prioritize."

Every December, headlines appear proclaiming a "War on Christmas" in an increasingly secular America. A page on the Fox News website is dedicated to the topic.

But for many Christians, the challenge posed by Christmas American-style has little to do with banned Nativity displays or generic holiday greetings.

Instead, say worshippers, Americans' fervent embrace of Black Friday megadeals, holiday partying, and round-the-clock pre-Christmas shopping has all but obliterated the religious significance of one of Christianity's most sacred celebrations.

"I try not to bash secular culture every Sunday," said Rev. Curtis Webster, interim pastor of St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, where Scott Green and his family attend.

"But this time of year I will say it feels like it's this irresistible tidal wave of demands, logistics. And I'm not speaking just for myself, but for everyone I know. They say, 'Gee, when I get to Christmas morning I don't have a sense of miracle and renewal. I have a sense of going, 'Whew, it's over.'"

Webster said his church, located across the street from Fashion Island, sometimes feels like a symbolic battleground between traditional Christian Christmas and the shopping extravaganza that has become America's predominant holiday ritual.

"The church has become countercultural in this season," Webster said. "Consumer culture is with us 12 months of the year. This is a time of year when it feels particularly oppressive."

Last Christmas, Americans spent $563 billion on gifts, greeting cards, flowers and other holiday items, according to the National Retail Federation. That's almost double the amount Americans gave to charities, including churches, throughout the entire year.

The retail federation expects holiday sales to rise more than 4 percent this year, including a record $140 per person for "self-gifts" — items bought for the shopper's own use.

Six million extra tons of holiday garbage goes to landfills each year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That includes 38,000 miles of ribbon and 38 million Christmas trees.

Such statistics prompted a small group of Christian pastors several years ago to start the Advent Conspiracy, an online movement dedicated to "turning Christmas upside down" by helping Christians choose between "the yoke of Christ or the yoke of consumerism," according to the group's website. The movement has grown to include a loose consortium of several thousand churches worldwide.

The group takes its name from the ancient Christian season of Advent, a weekslong penitential period before Christmas when worshippers prepared themselves for Christ's birth with prayer and fasting.

Churches affiliated with the Conspiracy follow four precepts: focus Christmas on worshipping God; spend less on gifts; spend more time with loved ones; give money saved from gift-buying to charity.

"Whatever holiness is supposed to be packed into this season is gone," said Tony Biaggne, creative director at The Crossing Church near St. Louis, one of the founding congregations of the movement. The Advent Conspiracy, Biaggne said, "gave people permission" to buck the consumer trend.

The movement now includes congregations in China, Thailand, Russia, the United Kingdom and Mexico, according to Biaggne. Thirty-nine thousand follow the group on Facebook.

One congregation affiliated with the movement is Mariners Church in Irvine, a 47-year-old megachurch that draws 10,000 worshippers on Sundays.

This year Mariners began preparing members to "celebrate different" as early as the end of October, said Blair Farley, the church's communications director.

Inserts in Sunday bulletins and sermons by senior pastor Kenton Beshore invited members to help cook for a public Thanksgiving dinner at the church and stage holiday parties for military families and a community center in Santa Ana.

In lieu of gifts from the mall, members were encouraged to give church-made gift cards that enable the recipient to donate to one of five causes, including medical clinics in impoverished countries and ending sexual trafficking.

Throughout December, Beshore has emailed congregants what he called a daily Advent prayer.

"Lord, I pray that Christmas would not sneak up on me this year. I don't want to arrive on Christmas morning with only my gifts wrapped and tasks accomplished," reads one of Beshore's prayers.

Ryan Bolger, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, said that only in recent years have churches begun speaking out against Christmas consumerism.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Bolger said, "the corporate model was the reigning model" as evangelical megachurches, seeking ever more members, aimed to emulate, not resist, the market-driven methods of corporate America.

Such churches toned down Advent and other ancient Christian rituals, recruited pastors with business backgrounds and de-emphasized contrasts between Christian ideals of self-sacrifice and Americans' embrace of upward mobility.

Now, said Bolger, an emerging wave of smaller, more community-oriented churches has begun to "call into question the righteousness of capitalism. They react to the empty promises that American society gave them, that bigger is better."

The Rev. Mark Stuart, interim rector at Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana, said his small church — roughly 200 attend on Sundays — does its best to keep Christmas centered on prayer, reflection and outreach.

"I don't harangue people," Stuart said. "That's not our style. It's more of a reminding people they're assaulted by consumerism and there's another focus we need to have in mind."

That focus includes Messiah's tutoring center for neighborhood children, along with financial and material support for a local homeless shelter and a child-care center for low-income families.

Stuart said older, more traditional Christian denominations, such as the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches, have long run counter to mainstream Christmas because they retain the ancient Christian focus on Advent as a time of solemn preparation.

"That's where the church head-butts popular culture," he said. "We don't celebrate before the time comes."

Advent services at Messiah are "more somber," Stuart said. There are no Christmas decorations or carols until Christmas services begin the night of Dec. 24.

At St. Mark Presbyterian, across the street from Fashion Island, member Susan Emery said the contrast between Christian solemnity and mainstream holiday hoopla was especially jarring this year.

Last month, Emery, who works for the city of Garden Grove's planning department, took over as organizer for her church's 29-year-old alternative holiday market.

Each year, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the church opens its fellowship hall to booths staffed by two dozen local and international nonprofit organizations selling handmade Christmas gifts. All proceeds — $20,000 this year — go to the organizations. Some church members do all their holiday shopping at the market.

Emery said she was especially struck this year by the gulf between her church's small charitable effort and one of Neiman Marcus' annual "fantasy gifts," a $250,000 dinner for 10 cooked at home by four famous chefs. The Fashion Island Neiman Marcus store is directly across a parking lot from St. Mark.

Emery said a bowl of lentil soup prepared by church members and served at the alternative Christmas market costs five dollars, with proceeds going to a Presbyterian hunger mission.

"The Christian way is more following in the way of Christ, always reaching out to those who are left out," she said. "It's countercultural if you think of the traditional Christmas where you make a list and give everyone what they want and you're stressed running around trying to find it."

"For myself, I just try to always start the day with prayer and daily devotions. ... That's always the challenge, to keep that focus."

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